Upon the scattered stars set sail
by junemermaid
Summary: Post-game. On the run from the templars, Fenris and Merrill find refuge on Isabela's ship. Isabela finds trouble in the form of old friends. Adventure, discovery, high jinks, ancient elven lore, magical sea battles and skulduggery! FenrisxIsabela.
1. Glimmer

**Disclaimer**: _Dragon Age II_ is (C) BioWare and Electronic Arts.

**Characters**: Fenris, Isabela, Merrill, whole party as supporting cast

**Pairings**: IsabelaxFenris

**Category**: Action/adventure, drama, friendship, romance

**Summary**: Set after the game. On the run from the templars, Fenris and Merrill find refuge on Isabela's ship. Isabela finds some trouble in the form of old friends. Adventure, discovery, high jinks, ancient elven lore, magical sea battles and skulduggery. And the awkward love song of Fenris and Isabela, on the side of it all.

– – – –

**1. Glimmer**

– – – –

_I have no abiding memory  
>No awakening, no flaming dart<br>No word of consolation  
>No arrow through my heart<br>Only a feeble notion  
>A glimmer from afar<em>

– Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, _Spell_

– – – –

Isabela has never been much good at waiting.

Oh, she can _anticipate_ like an old hand, but the rank dread that throngs the Gallows does nothing for her. Hooded heads twitch towards the black iron drop gates at the faintest noise, restless fingers flutter and tremble, not quite concealed by robe sleeves. Isabela squats down to check her blades, mostly so that her hands do not follow suit. They're fine daggers, Hawke's most earnest attempts at replacing her old matched pair after an ill-fated encounter with the Coterie that ended in a spirited half-naked escape through Darktown to the questionable refuge of Anders's clinic.

The fond memory is interrupted as Hawke turns from where he's been speaking with Orsino and to their small group. Six companions left, now, and Hawke a seventh. It never seemed that they were few; it used to feel like nothing could stand in their way. The poets say you get too old for such thoughts. _To the Void with the whole scribbling lot of them_. Still, their fearless leader has a heavy mien and a weight to his steps, and all of their eyes follow him as he walks across the broad stone floor to them.

This is it. The deep breath before the plunge, the trial by fire, the moment of truth. She almost turns to Varric to see if he can dredge up another cliché. If she were in her right mind, she'd have raised anchor and hoisted sail to catch the evening tide out.

She doesn't do goodbyes, but the moment hardly leaves her a choice. These insufferable people – and she has had to _strive_ to keep her scoundrel's infamy in this company – well, if Kirkwall is tumbling down around their ears, she couldn't ask for better hands on her deck. Or Hawke's deck. Details, at this point.

"Oh, Isabela!" Merrill drapes her arms around Isabela's neck with a soft hiccup. "What if..."

"Hush, Kitten." She pats Merrill's back and flashes her best rakish smirk as they separate. "We'll win in the end, remember?"

"I remember." Merrill touches the sweeping shaft of the staff that belonged to Keeper Marethari, strapped to her back. "I'm ready. Really, I am."

Leaving her and Aveline to exchange a few words, Isabela throws Anders a wry, crooked smile and leans down to plant a kiss on Varric's cheek, circles back to Aveline for a quick, strong clasp of hands, and comes face to face with Hawke. Hawke, who brought her here. Hawke, who fought the Qunari by her side, for her sake.

When he breaks her efforts at putting all this in suave phrases by crushing her into a hug and nearly concussing her with the stupid pointed gorget of his plate-reinforced field gear, she leans into him, in a tangle of arms and dagger sheaths and mage's staff. "I swear," she says, "I'm going to come through for you this time."

If he wants to defend the mages against a riptide of templars in a possibly futile gesture of selfless heroics, then she has her ways of getting a blade past those bloody tin cans they call armour. He smiles at her, wistful and too old on his easily smirking face. She lets him go to Anders to find or make what peace he can.

To one side, Orsino is gathering his people. Their moments of respite are dwindling. The templars can burst through every door and gate in the Gallows. There will be no walling themselves in, no protracted battle, not with half the mages about to soil themselves at the thought of raising a spell to their guards and jailors. The next few moments will decide the fight.

"So." With light steps, Fenris comes up to her.

"So." Isabela turns on her heel. "Well, I have a bottle of excellent Rivaini brandy hidden in my cabin for later."

He makes a throaty sound, halfway amused. "Is that – an invitation?"

For a heartbeat, she couldn't say if it is. What they have together is simple; she's been careful to keep it so. However tonight ends, their days in Kirkwall are over.

Tiptoeing, she threads one hand behind his neck to kiss him, because it'd be a pity to go to her death without one more when she has the chance. Blessedly, he answers her with a warm mouth and steady fingers gripping her shoulder. Her free hand fumbles for his. She curls her fingers around his calloused palm and the leather and steel of his gauntlet.

Hawke's voice tugs them apart. She drops her gaze and his hand. They both hover, heads bent, until the grind of the drop gate being hauled up jars the entire hall into taut attention.

"Let's go," she says.

"Yes." Fenris tugs his sword loose, and Isabela finds the hilts of her daggers, sure and steady again.


	2. Divide

– – – –

**2. Divide**

– – – –

Merrill stumbles, muffling a yelp as her bare foot slips on some unnameable grime coating the tunnel floor. The flame at the end of her staff dips and almost singes Isabela's scarf.

"Careful, Kitten," she gasps.

Ahead, the light of Aveline's lantern halts. "Can you keep up?"

"We cannot stop here." Fenris pushes away from Isabela and braces himself on the rough-hewn wall. His markings glimmer unevenly. She's almost certain he has a cracked bone or two in his leg, but he refuses to slow down. Even getting him to lean on her took effort.

"Yes, I'm all right, I'm sorry! Let's go." Supporting herself on her staff, Merrill hurries on.

The clank of Aveline's armour and the resumed scuff of their steps echo in the quiet. The corridors blur all sense of time. It is some blighted hour of the night at which all respectable folk should be abed and all self-esteeming rogues well into their valuables.

Fenris limps after Merrill with wayward steps. Isabela draws her one remaining dagger – the curved red steel blade Zevran gave Hawke in parting – to guard the rear. If the minstrels ever sing of the Champion of Kirkwall's escape from the city, she hopes they skip the part about the muck and dark and exhaustion, the sting of unhealed injuries and the dread of running into chokedamp in the corridors.

"How much farther is it?" Aveline's question carries back to her.

"We should be under the harbour," comes Anders's worn reply. All three of their mages stagger with exertion. Hawke's fractured arm is cradled in a crude sling, with Anders too spent to tend either to it or to Fenris's leg. Aveline left her shattered shield in the Gallows courtyard. Her plate mail seems the most of what holds her together. Isabela hears, now and then, the wet hitch of her breathing. Varric escaped the worst harm, but his quiver rattles with only a couple of bolts. They're all caked in blood, singed and chilled by ambient magic, and grimly focused on one purpose: get through Anders's handy escape tunnel before the templars come.

"And when we reach Darktown?" Fenris snaps.

"Kirkwall won't be a prime place for any of us right now," Varric cuts in. "I'm sure the Knight-Captain is a right gentleman, but he won't be able to hold back the templars from our tail."

As the others voice agreement, Isabela nods to herself. She has a ship in the harbour, a stash in a place as secure as a cunning mind can find in Kirkwall, and every intention of sailing by sunrise, if they aren't lost in these sodding tunnels or gutted by templars by then.

"We knew that when we stood with the mages." Hawke's good-humoured tones have become low and grave. It is that voice he wields when he needs you to believe his words are the sacred truth of Andraste herself. _Trust me,_ it says. "We can lie low in Darktown for a bit, and then make for Tantervale over the mountains."

"I need to get word..." Aveline begins.

The ceiling sags with a sigh of rubble and dust. Isabela moves as Fenris does, their reaching arms colliding to sweep them both to the floor. She covers her head and his best as she can as chunks of rock cascade from the cracked ceiling. Fenris bites back a hoarse noise, then goes into a ragged coughing fit at the smothering dust.

Little by little, the rumbling dies off. Spitting and hawking, Isabela clambers onto her knees. "Varric? Hawke!"

A draft of air touches her face, damp and chill. The lyrium in Fenris's skin glows and dulls and glows again – the only light she can see. The corridor is filled with shattered masonry, a jagged shaft of darkness looming up from the point of collapse.

"_Merrill_?"

The others walked a good few paces ahead of them. Merrill, only a couple.

"I don't see her," Fenris says low. He heard the despairing note in her voice. The near-dark corridor sways in her vision.

"No," she grits out. "No, no – Maker's _balls_, we made it through scores of templars and crazy walking statues and – don't you _dare_, not now..."

"Isabela." She wants to wallop him for the way his voice softens on her name.

"Don't. Just don't."

"No. Look." He nudges her shoulder.

The floor before them shivers as if with a tiny aftershock, the layer of pebbles clattering. In a whirl of dusty shadows, Merrill's thin form spins up from the ground. Blood dribbles gently from her closed left fist. "Oh, good, it worked! That was a bit close."

"Kitten!" Isabela scrambles to her feet, a wave of unabashed relief washing away her stunned anguish. Too much, but she doesn't care right now.

"She's lucky to still have her own skin." Fenris stands, too, laboriously.

"She has her _life._"

"Is that you, Isabela? Thank Mythal you're all right! Where are the others?" Merrill grasps her arm with her good hand. "I had no choice, I _promise. _I can barely light a flame, and that spell takes a lot out of you."

"It's all right." Isabela rests her chin on Merrill's dirt-laced hair. "Are you hurt?"

"Just bruises." She swallows. "There was this sort of pocket under the rocks, and I..."

"Shh, it's over." The sooner Merrill leaves the moment – and Isabela's imagination can draw it up vividly enough – the better.

"There's – a draft." Fenris's words contract on a gasp of effort. "From up there."

Anders knew the route from the Gallows cellars to Darktown, but his secret tunnel is by no means the only passage snaking beneath Kirkwall. Isabela tries to summon every tidbit she's picked up about the network of corridors, mostly piecemeal knowledge from fellow smugglers and others who need to come and go unseen.

It would help if she had any more of an idea where they are than "under the harbour".

With a spark of magic, Merrill strikes a tawny flame upon her staff again. She holds it aloft into the hole in the ceiling. "Do you think there could be another tunnel?"

"I don't fancy turning back to fight more templars," Fenris says.

"I'll try to..." As Merrill sets her foot on a hunk of stone to try and climb the wreckage, Isabela snaps her hand up in a stilling motion. There was a sound.

A voice. A hope, crawling bloody and breathless through the jumble of rock.

Trying to peer through the top proves in vain. At Isabela's gesture, Merrill brings the flame over. The liquid light plays over the nooks and crevices of the heap.

"– vaini?"

"Varric?" The rocks are not stable, but Isabela scoots her foot into a cranny the allows her to hitch herself up along them, anyway. "Are you there?"

"Yeah, keep it in your lack of pants." She has to cant her head to hear. Somewhere is a gap big enough for sound and air to travel. "I've got Hawke, Aveline and Blondie here, though he's glowing blue and mumbling something about..."

She hears a shuffle of movement, then Hawke's voice. "Isabela? Are Merrill and Fenris there?"

"Yes."

"Tell her not to do a _twitch_ of magic. The Fade's just about pouring down our throats here. Must be Meredith's merry fireworks show of crazy at the Gallows. It echoed."

" 'Echoed'?"

Merrill pokes her head up beside Isabela's shoulder. "Hawke? Yes, um. I know. I feel like I've got deepwood ants scurrying through my veins. There's spirits thick all around us."

"Demons," Fenris says tersely. "Yet you used blood magic."

Isabela squeezes her eyes shut as Hawke and Merrill babble hasty mage business at each other. They passed an intersection not too long ago. They have to double back and try to find a parallel passage. The ceiling may or may not hold, the templars may or may not be hot on their heels, and Fenris may or may not be able to walk on his untreated leg for much longer.

And every member of their ragtag band that _likes _shouldering absurd amounts of responsibility is on the wrong side of that cave-in.

"Isabela," Merrill whispers, "Varric wants you. He says we shouldn't stay here. Something about the tunnel maybe collapsing." They can barely see each other, but Isabela is certain all blood has fled Merrill's harried face. She presses her hands against the cold stone and leans up again.

"Any gems of insight?" She puts as much of a grin in her voice as she can.

"Don't get buried under there." He's doing the same. That comforts her a little. "And take care of Daisy, will you?"

"Both of them." _Ah, Isabela, weren't you through with selfless promises of succour?_

"If you must. Listen. If we can't meet up in Darktown, there's a charming – or so I _hear_ – city called Bastion on the Antivan border..." Ridiculously she wishes she could touch him, listening and committing to memory the handful of names he can give her, a lifeline in the dark. Too soon, it is time to go.

"Stay alive, Varric." If she closes her eyes, she can see him smirk. "I still need to woo Bianca out of your grasp."

"Not in this lifetime, Rivaini," he chuckles, "but I'm in no rush to see about the next, either."

With that and a scuff of stones, a faint jangle of armour and the palest, fleetest flutter of blue through the narrow gap in the pile, they are gone. Slowly, Isabela turns to Fenris and Merrill. She's dressed her hand with a strip of her tunic. He stands, without support, lyrium markings gleaming.

"We're getting out of here," Isabela tells them. "All of us."


End file.
